I believe in rehydrating as much as the next person, but heavy rain this week nearly saw the cup runneth over.
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Not so much for the country and the farmers etc that have been crying out for a good soak. More in relation to sweat, heading down the M1 last Sunday afternoon just as ye olde rain bomb detonated along the Hunter coast. Talk about timing.
A family member had purchased their first car the day before, a zippy little second hand manual, and the thinking had had been they'd need an escort just in case we'd bought a dud. Indeed driving a manual takes practice for those who got their licence in an automatic, and a crash course had been held the day before during which we were reminded how crash courses get their name. Two words sum up the Room 101 fear of every novice manual driver and their, ahem, 'instructors' - hill start. Brutal clutch moments on the gearbox of the mind, not to mention the car. The prospect of doing them in the rain, let alone traffic, had only added to the elephant in the back seat.
But practice made perfect, and come the next day there were places to be, and as it turned out, weather events to collide with. So we headed off. I should have organised some snipers too, and perhaps a meteor shower. Not that the downpour encountered didn't resemble an asteroid attack. Or was that a panic attack? It's hard to tell being the passenger sometimes.
Nearly as overwhelming as listening to anti-maskers bang on about their rights during a pandemic. Talk about Trumped-up sovereign citizens. Hope they hang tough if a vaccine ever comes along. One prominent anti-masker filmed at Bunnings in Melbourne, a professional psychic as it turned out, gave an insight into a dim-witted future with her misconstrued views on legal freedom. I fear she will get a real surprise if she ever robs a bank.
Just got to shake the head, which is what I was doing as those clouds opened up hurtling over Mooney Mooney Bridge. Many thoughts ran through the mind. We're gonna need a bigger boat, was one. Another went along the lines of - are we actually on this bridge? It's sometimes hard to tell during a deluge, what with all the the mist, spray and general overstimulation. You hit a certain speed - about Mach 7 - and the relentless whirring of the wipers starts to blend into Spotify being ordered by Siri to skip a tune by a young pilot disconcertingly keen to forward the surely ironically titled "chill-vibe" playlist to a more relaxing number while a B-Double ghosts by seemingly intent on running us off that road we can't see anyhow.
Yeah it gets a bit hectic, and you start to think, contrary to what they say about journeys, it's the destination that counts now - and not arriving dead on time.
Which gets us back to rehydration, I was down on bodily fluids by the time we got there. But nothing a stiff snifter of fortitude couldn't lubricate. Indeed, there was no masking the relief, but it will be an even bigger comfort if we behave as requested during COVID and cut back on the community moronic-ness.